Music: P.G. Wodehouse’s Comic Eden

“To be a humorist,” P.G. Wodehouse once wrote, “one must see the world out of focus. You must, in other words, be slightly cockeyed.” Wodehouse shared with countless millions of delighted readers his own slightly cockeyed, out-of-focus vision of the world in 70-odd novels, more than 300 short stories, 500 essays and articles, 40 or so plays and musicals and numerous movies—not to mention snippets of some of the funniest verse ever written in English. Many people grew up on Wodehouse and grew old on Wodehouse; his literary output, as reliable and regular as the seasons, never faltered or faded. Until he died of a heart attack in his home on Long Island, N.Y., at the age of 93, many of his readers must have assumed that Wodehouse—like Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, his best-known literary creations—was immortal.

Forbidden Fruit. Irish Playwright Sean O’Casey dismissed Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) as English literature’s “performing flea,” an acidulous comment that P.G. himself (“Plum” to friends) loved to repeat. But other writers, ranging from Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell to Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh, recognized that Wodehouse was a good bit more. Waugh, an indisputable master of the comic novel, would reread his favorites from the Wodehouse canon every year, as some people go back for spiritual sustenance to Shakespeare or the Bible. “For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man, no ‘aboriginal calamity,’ ” Waugh wrote. “His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled.”

Wodehouse—the P.G. stood for Pelham Grenville—had no halfhearted readers. He was either admired to the point of addiction or not admired at all. Like all fanatics, Wodehouse readers could only feel sorry for those who lacked the special sense of humor that allowed them to wander through the sunlit gardens of that little Eden at Blandings or to guffaw as the omniscient Jeeves pulled addlepated Bertie Wooster out of the clutches of his Aunt Agatha or the local constabulary. Wodehouse addicts had their own favorite characters. The author himself confessed he bent toward Lord Emsworth, the daffy ninth Earl of Blandings, who spent most of his time escaping through the hedges from his domineering sister Constance or making sure that his beloved pig, the Empress of Blandings, won first prize at the local fair. Others, perhaps a majority, preferred the stories about Jeeves, who, with a “voice as dignified as tawny port,” was unquestionably the most famous gentleman’s gentleman in history. Wodehouse, who had a firm and unchanging sense of priorities, was mildly horrified when anyone would mistake that fictional paragon for a mere butler.

Schoolboy Code. The imaginary Wodehouse world, set somewhere between 1915 and 1935—the author could not be more precise—never changed. Even the most careful critic would be hard put to tell whether a novel was written last year or 50 years earlier. Wodehouse’s stable of characters had bits and pieces added to them, but they never really developed or, indeed, aged by much more than an hour. Even their names suggested a Merrie England that never was—Gussie Fink-Nottle, Galahad Threepwood, Boko Fittleworth. The ethic that pervaded all the books and novels was Wodehouse’s own: the schoolboy’s code carried on into adult life. Fun and pranks are virtually demanded, but one must never be disloyal or let the team down. Jeeves can be seen as the headmaster, stern, wise but always fair, while Bertie is the bubbling, bumbling fifth-former, the perpetual adolescent who finds the world too confusing but always gets by, if just barely.

At the beginning, anyway, Wodehouse knew about the world of butlers and country houses only secondhand. His father was a judge in Hong Kong, and Wodehouse and his three brothers spent their boyhoods with relatives in England. He went to Dulwich College, a good but not famous public school near London; he was all set to attend Oxford, when the Indian rupee, on which his father’s pension was pegged, collapsed. Instead, he got a job at the London office of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Unhappy at the bank, he began writing. In 1902 he published his first novel (The Pothunters) and left banking to write a humor column for the now defunct London Globe. He also took his first trip to America—and began saving for his second.

Most of his readers assumed that Wodehouse lived in Mayfair, around the block from Bertie Wooster’s Drones Club, or in Shropshire, near Blandings Castle. In fact, the most English of English writers lived most of his life in the U.S., which always had a romantic attraction for him. “America’s never been a foreign country to me,” he said not long ago. “It always seemed like my own country. I don’t know why, but I’d much sooner live here than in England.”

Big Break. The feeling of affection might well have been inspired, at least in part, by the fact that his big break as a writer came in America. In 1914 the Saturday Evening Post paid Wodehouse $3,500 for rights to one of his novels, the beginning of a long and profitable relationship. At the same time, Wodehouse began writing plays with Guy Bolton, who became his lifelong friend. Both men collaborated with Jerome Kern on a series of fabulously successful musicals in the teens and ’20s, including Oh Lady, Lady and Sitting Pretty. Perhaps the Wodehouse words that most Americans know best—although few can identify him as the author—are the lyrics to the song Bill from Show Boat.

The movies also sought Wodehouse’s talents. For a time in the ’30s, he was one of the highest-paid writers in the world, earning $2,500 a week from MGM on top of his royalties from novels and plays. He and his wife Ethel, whom he married in 1914 and who survives him, lived for a time in London, where they had butlers and maids of their own. In the ’30s, they settled at Le Touquet, a French island resort on the English Channel. When the Germans invaded in 1940, friends advised them to flee to England, but they could not think of a way to get their treasured dogs past England’s six-month animal quarantine. They were still pondering when Wodehouse was carted off to a Nazi internment camp.

He was actually well treated by the Germans, and when CBS Radio in 1941 asked him to describe life there, Wodehouse, one of nature’s innocents, saw no reason why he should not say to an American audience how pleasant things were. That decision, as he later ruefully admitted, was as simple-minded as any thing Bertie Wooster had ever done. The British, who were momentarily awaiting a German invasion, were outraged.

Wodehouse, who only two years before had received an honorary degree from Oxford, was virtually branded a traitor in Parliament and the press. Toward the end of the war, the British, in a calmer mood, recanted, but Wodehouse never went back to England. He returned to America in 1947 and eight years later became a U.S. citizen.

Slowing Down. As he grew older, Wodehouse slowed down from the breathtaking writing pace of his youth, turning out “only” one novel a year — to gether, of course, with a few short stories. His prose, which looked so simple and read so well, was actually the result of great effort. He would plot out each zany story as if he were programming a computer, with perhaps 400 pages of notes, and he would write and rewrite every page nine or ten times. “Every thing I’ve turned out is as good as I can make it,” he said. “I’ve never not taken trouble over anything.”

He began to feel old, he said, only after 90. “When I was in my 70s, I felt as if I were in my 30s. And my 80s were all right. But I’m feeling a bit ninetyish lately,” he complained last year. Still, his mind was as nimble as ever, and his pen as clever and facile. One of the great moments of his life came only last month, when Queen Elizabeth named him a knight, which allowed friends to call him “Sir Plum.”

In his customary self-deprecating way — half-humorous but wholly serious — Wodehouse had written his own epitaph years before: “When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up: ‘But he did take trouble.’ ”

Gerald Clark